Sky Flower glided down on the cloud and fluttered her wings for a moment to get her balance back. She was the best endurance flier on the team, and consequently spent the least amount of time with her hooves on clouds. Everypony thought that if she didn't have to sleep, she'd probably never land at all.
While that probably wasn't really true, it did make her the best choice for a spotter, and nopony ever mocked her for her uncertainty when she was on a cloud. Sky Flower was the best early warning mare the team had ever had.
“The storm's coming from the southwest,” she told them. “Kinda skirting the shoreline. There's a whole row of anvil clouds leading the way, and it looks like the winds are gonna be terrible. I didn't have a chance to get a real good look at the ocean, but the waves are kicking up already.”
Aurora nodded her head. “Can we get out in front of it and push it off?”
“Maybe.” She shifted around on the unlevel cloudtop. “Judging by where it’s sitting, I think that Hayfield Harbor tried that and got it a bit off the coast. If we can hold it back until the prevailing winds shift, we might get it further out to sea.”
“Fillydelphia's been complaining that they have to deal with all the feral weather,” Morning Monarch muttered.
“Well, if we had more ponies on our team, we'd be able to push it further out.” Cloud Climber kicked a tuft of cloud. “I think we can do it. What do we have, four on primary duty today?”
Aurora nodded. “Me and you and Monarch and Star Catcher. And we can get the next shift and the auxiliary team in the air if we need them.”
“You're gonna,” Sky Flower said. “And pretty quick, too. Do you want me to fly down and tell everypony?”
“Grass and rocks are the stuff you land on,” Monarch reminded her. “That's green and shaggy, and grey and black in that order. Don't land on other ponies to warn them.”
Sky Flower rolled her eyes. “I know what to land on. Do you want everypony to meet up at the forward post? 'Cause I don't think that there's gonna be time to assemble everyone. I got a bad feeling about this storm.”
Aurora lifted a hoof and rubbed her chin. “I think . . . maybe just have them form pairs and help push it off the coast, that's best. Sailorponies, they probably already know it's coming, and they're gonna be putting into harbor or staying well out to sea. Nopony's gonna be happy if it drifts inland, and if us four of us start on point, we can help guide it offshore, especially as everypony else gets mustered.”
“We’ll use the lighthouse as a rendezvous.” Monarch looked over the edge of the cloud for a moment, just to make sure it was still there. “That way, you can make changes if needed.”
“Okay.” Aurora nodded. “I like that. Us four will get at the front, in the usual pairs. Sky Flower, you let everypony in town know what's coming, and have them form up on us, in a diagonal line.”
“Got it.” Sky Flower saluted, and then jumped off the cloud, gliding down towards Chonamare.
• • •
Aurora and Monarch took the second flight. As the mare in command, Aurora knew that it was foalish to be at the very front of the storm—it tended to be windy and nasty, but wasn’t the true marker of what the storm actually had to offer. Further back inside of the storm she would truly know what made it up, and she could position other pegasi as needed once she'd gotten a proper sense of it.
So, as more weathermares arrived, she and Monarch would shift positions down the line, until they were alongside the storm proper.
Cloud and Star got to stay at the front, since both of them were skilled at storm management. She knew that they'd both be pushing it off to the east as best they could, and they were both proficient enough with feral weather to not do anything dumb.
Aurora was glad it was mid-season and everypony was experienced—breaking in a new recruit was always a challenge. Most of the weatherponies on her team came from generations of coastal pegasi who knew what real feral weather was, but every now and then she wound up with an unwanted inland pony on her team, a mare who had decided that scheduled weather was too boring. Every one of them was a hotshot, and every one of them was a braggart, and every one of them had no idea that the ocean showed no mercy, but they never really believed it until they fought their first hurricane or nor'easter and half of them quit on the spot and slunk back inland with their tail between their legs.
The further out we can guide it, the better. Aurora glanced off to her left, where she could just see the fading specks of Cloud Climber and Star Catcher.
• • •
Even with Sky Flower's warning, the speed of the storm front came as a nasty surprise. Cloud Climber and Star Catcher got out to their monitoring positions and began gathering together cloud tufts to make a temporary perch—they both knew that it was going to be utterly destroyed in the storm, but it would be a good resting place as long as it lasted, since there was nothing beneath them but open ocean.
Once that was done, there was nothing to do but wait while the distant clouds grew closer and closer, going from a vague warning into a towering mountain of doom.
Their initial altitude estimate was woefully inadequate, and the pair worked together to push the cloud higher, but it quickly became obvious that that was a foal's errand. The wall of clouds in front towered over their pathetic perch, rumbling and grumbling with thunder and lightning.
Star swallowed down a lump in her throat. No matter how many times she did this, the big storms still scared her. As it bore down upon them, she imagined it stretching out even further, reaching across the very ocean in its fury, striking down everypony who dared to oppose it.
Cloud, meanwhile, was standing at the very edge of their temporary outpost, her eyes fixed on the towering tops of the anvil clouds as her mane and tail whipped around her. “Sky Flower said it's hungry,” she shouted over the gusting wind. “It doesn't want to make landfall, not yet. It wants some more moisture in it. We ought to be able to lead it, just a little. When we get the auxiliary teams helping, I think we're gonna be able to push it off. All we've got to do is make it follow us.”
“That's what I'm afraid of.” Star could already feel the storm's potential. It was tugging at her coat, trying to get her to become a part of it. I should have transferred inland.
“It just wants a little bit of guidance.”
Star flattened her ears. She'd never felt like she was that good at reading storms, even though it had always worked out for her in the past. She hated the waiting time, because it gave her time to think about what might go wrong.
I shoulda told Aurora I was sick.The storm was roaring towards them, whipping the sea up into a frenzy. She could just make out a few fishing boats hurrying to safety, rushing for the safe harbor. Most of them looked like they would make it, although there was one set of sails that was uncomfortably offshore.
She could barely make out Aurora and Monarch, setting up their position above the shoals, and when she looked back towards Chonamare, she could faintly see pegasi beginning to gather around the lighthouse.
We're not alone. Sky Flower would be telling the secondary teams and the auxiliary what was coming. Pretty soon, there would be lots of ponies in the air, and they'd all be pushing back against the storm. I can’t wimp out.
“Come on!” Cloud Climber scraped at the edge of the cloud, and then lifted off, hovering just above it.
“I dunno.” Aurora and Monarch skirted the edge of the storm, feeling the angry clouds. “I think—”
“This isn't that bad.” Aurora dipped her hoof into the seething mass of clouds. “It's gonna be rough, but we can push it off.”
As long as we're not alone. They weren't—a gaggle of pegasi was already swarming around the Chonamare light, and while it was too far to recognize anypony at this distance, it looked like everpony on the weather team was in flight, along with the auxiliary and additional volunteers. Clusters of ponies were gathering, briefly highlighted in the sweeping beam before they, too, moved out over the ocean. “You're right.” Star kicked off the cloud and followed Aurora, moving ever closer to the angry mass of clouds. “Look, everypony's coming out.”
“If we can hold the line.” Aurora looked back at her wingmare for a moment. “We've got to get it moving to the east, and then it's gonna follow along.”
“Yeah!” Monarch flew up alongside the team leader. “A bit of a push, while everypony's getting in order, and we'll have this.”
The thin line of off-duty and auxiliary weather ponies made a ragged line from the lighthouse to the sea, but at least the line was growing more solid faster than the incoming storm. Or at least Aurora hoped.
More stragglers were still coming in when Monarch gave the order to start pushing, which would hopefully force the storm off its current path and further out to sea.
They'd started before the front reached them, to give their artificial winds time enough to build. Monarch flew up and down the line, shouting orders as the storm began to slowly respond to the weatherponies. Slight adjustments were made, and ponies were shifted left and right in an attempt to increase the effect of the winds.
• • •
Cloud Climber and Star Catcher were at the very fore end of the line, holding the furthest position north. If all went as planned, the storm would pass to the east of them.
Cloud briefly lost focus on her patch of sky as the storm rolled over the defensive line as if it wasn't there. She could see dozens of pegasi dropping out from under it, making quick wing rolls beneath the angry face of the clouds before they flew to their fallback positions.
It’s not so bad. Star Catcher thought. When she was actually fighting the storm and not just looking at it, her confidence had quickly returned. It’s not like we’ve got to bust it all the way back to water vapor, just keep it off shore.
She glanced down for a second at the angry sea roiling beneath them, stirred up by the storm above. Even once it was gone, it would take the ocean a while to settle back down.
“A little further back and higher,” Cloud Climber shouted above the waves.
Star nodded, and the two mares let the gusting winds from the front push them up and back, then they began forcing the storm again, shoving it ever so gently away from the coast.
By the time the two pegasi realized that they were too far out to sea, it was too late. The storm was bigger and nastier than they’d thought, and it roared down on them like an avalanche.
There was no more time for talking, only fighting nature’s raw fury. The storm lashed out at them, and they fought back, each focusing on setting up a counterflow to budge the storm back over the sea where it belonged. Both of them could clearly see the front of the clouds dimple slightly as it met their unexpected resistance.
They had no choice but to move a bit further apart as they worked the front, and they could only focus on the clouds right in front of their muzzles, tumbling and rolling in the complicated air currents.
Star and Cloud struggled to hold their positions as well as they could, even though both could sense that they were being pushed back. Still, they could feel that the storm was beginning to shift to the east, and that was what really mattered.
• • •
It wasn't until the second time that she heard the horn's call that she realized they were being recalled. She'd completely lost awareness of everypony else in her fight with the storm.
When she looked to her right, she realized that a towering cumulonimbus cloud was between her and land. Somehow, it had pushed its way in and she hadn't even noticed.
I hope Star Catcher is okay. Cloud dropped down—flying into a cumulonimbus cloud was incredibly stupid—and turned north, intending to skirt around the front of it.
The cloud base was lower than she'd thought, or maybe updrafts had pushed her higher than she'd meant to go. At the moment, the cloud obscured the land completely, and it was really hard to tell how high she was with only the ocean below as a reference point.
When she got under the front edge of it, she got a better view of shore. She still couldn't see Star Catcher, but she could see a few other pegasi making their way back towards Chonamare.
She leveled off and began flying a direct course to land. Once I'm clear of the cloud, I'll climb back up a little bit and make sure that Star's gone off-station. She might not have heard the horn, either.
The winds under the cloud weren't her friend. They were pushing her north and down, and she fought back, trying to find a path through the worst of them.
Cloud caught a brief glimpse of Star's blue and pink tail before she suddenly got soaked by a monsoon of rain that was immediately followed by a peppering of hailstones.
She shook her mane out of her eyes and felt around for the edge of the rainwall—off to her side, it looked a little less intense, so she flew in that direction and was rewarded by clipping the edge of a downdraft that flipped her over before she could even react.
Somewhere below her, the ocean was waiting to swallow her up, and not knowing how far below it was was nerve wracking. She twisted around to get her hooves back under her and managed to get upright again, although now she had no idea which direction she was facing. The winds around her were variable and unpredictable, and she couldn’t see anything.
If she didn't fly southeast, she'd be fine—she hadn't been in the rain all that long. She could fly off in one direction, and if she didn't get out when she thought she should, she could just make a 90 degree turn, and that would surely be the correct direction.
As she flew, the rain and hail lessened, which was a relief.
Cloud Climber didn't notice right away when the updraft caught her. She was thinking about the tavern and the warm pot of stew that would be waiting for them, and how she was going to have to admit she'd been caught in the middle of the storm like a foal.
But then she realized that it was getting darker and she was in the cloud, even though she should have been clear of it by now.
The air currents were strange and unknown to her. She could feel the electricity in the cloud prickling at her coat, and that was all wrong; it didn't have the charge that it should. With rising dread, she began to realize that she had been sucked inside a supercell, which was the king of clouds.
She could faintly make out flashes of lightning inside the cloud, and she flew towards a particularly bright one, hoping that maybe she could get out under the bottom of it. It was a good idea, until she got hit by a violent updraft, one that was far too big for her to get out of.
At first, she tried to fly against it, but that was no good; the cloud was too strong for her. Then she remembered that it was like a rip tide, and she should instead try to fly across it.
Her wings were icing up and it was getting hard to breathe. Half-frozen raindrops and hailstones swirled around her. Her coat crackled with electricity, which arced off onto hailstones as they rose beside her.
I'll never make it out of this cloud. But she kept fighting it, and the fear that gnawed deep in her belly that this was it; she was going to use up all her energy and crash into the ocean and drown or else get blown up so high that she'd suffocate at the top of the world.
Small hailstones were sticking to her and freezing on, upsetting her balance. Her face was numbing with the cold as she fought on, desperately searching for a way out. Even without looking, she could feel her wings stiffening as the accreting ice began to entomb her mid-flight.
The cloud thickened into a mist of death, a thick patch of glare ice that she had no hope of escaping. She had no sense of up and down.
Sometimes when she was walking on the beach, she’d see a bit of driftwood caught up right at the water line, tumbling over and over in the breakers, and now she knew what that felt like.
Her left wing cramped and the wind caught it and before she could react she was tumbling again and there was nothing she could do as she crashed through the cloud like a giant hailstone.
Lost at Sea Chapter 2: Lost at Sea Admiral Biscuit
Aurora always stayed out until last, in order to make sure that all her team had gotten to shore safely. Keeping track after a big storm when other shifts and reserve ponies and the auxiliary got called out was especially difficult, especially if stragglers had arrived after the storm had started. That was why she tried to put her own eyes on everypony who flew out, and why everypony knew to stick with their wingmare.
Neither Cloud Climber nor Star Catcher had flown to shore.
They might not have heard the signal. The storm was already many leagues north of Chonamare, and they’d been at the very front of the storm.
Aurora wasn't looking forward to flying all the way to the front and then around to tell them the fight was over—but that inconvenience was better than losing a pair of weathermares.
She turned to Monarch. “Go back to the tavern and make sure that nopony drinks too much. If I don't come back with Cloud Climber and Star Catcher, we're gonna have to do a search. Get everypony ready to go and send somepony—send a couple ponies—down to the fishing docks to tell the sailors.”
Monarch nodded and rocketed off towards town. She knew as well as anypony how the weather teams got after they'd successfully fought off a big storm. As often as not, it was the sailors or townsponies who were buying the celebratory drinks. She wasn't looking forward to telling them that the celebration was over, at least until their wayward companions were found.
As she got close, she realized that she needn't have worried. A few pegasi were still circling around above the tavern, looking out towards the ocean. Of course they know not everypony's come back. They know who was on duty with us.
Inside, nopony was eating or drinking. Conversations were quiet, and as soon as she opened the door, every ear turned to her.
“Cloud Climber and Star Catcher aren't back yet,” she announced, although of course everypony in the tavern had already figured that out. “Aurora is flying around to the front of the storm and hopefully they just didn't hear the horn over all the noise.”
“We ought to search.” Twinkle Bloom said.
“We're gonna, as soon as we find out if they're really gone or if they just didn't hear the horn.” Monarch flicked her tail—Aurora hadn't said to get a search party in the air right away, but it wouldn't hurt. “I need a dozen volunteers who'll go back alongside the storm to look. And a couple of ponies to fly down to the docks to tell the sailorponies to be looking, too, as soon as they can put back out to sea.
“But we shouldn't fly off right away. If everypony's flying around looking on her own, it's only gonna be worse.”
Assembling a search team was no trouble at all; every pegasus in the pub volunteered. She quickly picked the oldest and most experienced, and had them out the door before Star Catcher landed alone.
“She was right behind me,” Star Catcher said. “That's what I told Aurora. We'd gotten separated by the big cumulonimbus cloud on the front of the storm, and I was worried about her, 'cause the storm was so wild. After the horn call, I saw her coming under the cloud, and then she got hit by a bunch of rain and hail and when it cleared off, she wasn't there any more. I didn't see her in the water, either.
“I knew that somepony was gonna come looking for us, so I kept circling around where I was, and I was calling for her and I kept an eye towards the ocean hoping that I could find her. And then when Aurora came, I told her what had happened, and now she's circling and holding position.”
Monarch nodded. “Get inside and eat some stew. You're almost done in.”
“Not until we find her!” Star slammed her hoof on the floor. “I can’t—“
“You’re right.” It wasn’t what Monarch wanted, and she was sure Aurora would be mad, too. If it was Aurora lost in the storm, I’d be going after her.
Besides, if she said no, like as not Star would fly off anyway.
“Twinkle, you get some food together. If you can’t get it on one of the fishing boats that’s going out to search, have a couple of pegasi knock together a cloud and tow it out. Star, you know the way. Let’s get the search team over the water.”
With star at the lead, the rescue brigade emptied out of the tavern and took to the sky again, quickly climbing above Chonamare as they headed back to sea.
As they flew over the harbor, they looked down to see Captain Disko raising her sails. Harbor ponies were quickly throwing off the spring lines and shoving the boat back from the dock.
The Merry Ambree wasn't the only one making ready to leave, either. Three of the other fishing boats were hubs of activity as their crews prepared to put out to sea on a rescue mission, even though the tail of the storm was still raging outside the harbor and waves were crashing over the breakwall.
• • •
The pegasi searched the sea and sky until nightfall, and the fishing boats patrolled throughout the night with lanterns blazing high atop their masts, but nopony found Cloud. It was if the ocean or the storm had completely swallowed her up.
When Cloud Climber came to, she was lying on the remains of a cloud outcropping. The only reason it had stayed together at all was because she had been on it.
She jerked her head up. What happened? Where did my roof go? Then she realized that this wasn’t her house at all, and the memory of being inside the supercell, fighting for her life, came crashing back to her. Somehow I must have gotten spit out of the cloud.
Relief almost instantly turned to panic. She was lost above the clouds, with no idea of where home was. There were no other pegasi anywhere around her, not as far as she could see.
She was within a heartbeat of leaping off her tenuous perch and flying west as quickly as her wings could carry her, but a voice at the back of her mind shouted at her to be cautious. Her whole body still ached from fighting the supercell, and a few moments to assess her situation would almost certainly pay off in the long run.
Like the sea, clouds were ever-shifting landmarks. The storm she'd been fighting had changed shape, and the prominent cumulonimbus clouds that had been at the fore of it were no more, or if they were still there, they'd blown out of eyeshot.
She could make a rough estimate of direction from the sun, although without knowing what time it was, that was only a vague guess. It felt like it was the afternoon, and if that was the case, she could fly sunward and eventually she'd make landfall.
How eventually was the life-or-death question. Cloud couldn't see any land in any direction. The clouds had spread out to cover the ocean completely. They were thick enough and high enough that she couldn't see any landmarks through them.
How long was I out? Probably not for too long: her mane and tail still felt damp. Probably land was still within reach—all she'd have to do was fly approximately west for as far as she could bear, and then make a nice, efficient glide through the clouds. Odds were that she wouldn't find Chonamare, because the storm had been blowing north, and there was little chance she'd be able to fly blind and find her hometown.
But land was a start. There would be other ponies who could tell her where she was, and she could rest and then maybe tomorrow fly back to Chonamare or if it was too far she could take the train to the nearest station and fly from there.
We were pushing the storm east. She hesitated at the edge of her cloud-perch. Sky Flower said it was thirsty and wanted more water, so it would want to go kind of east on its own. But they couldn't leave it alone, because Equestria curved in. The storm might have have gotten more water as it ran along the coast, and the drag from the land would hook it around into Fillydelphia or Manehattan.
If she was further east than she thought, and if the storm had pushed further north than she imagined, she could fly until her wings were ready to give out, glide down through the cloud, and if she saw only water underneath the cloud deck, what then?
There were lots of ships around Fillydelphia and Manehattan, and as long as she crossed through the clouds before nightfall, they wouldn't be too hard to spot. Their masts would be an easy thing to see.
But if she couldn't make it far enough . . . those were rainclouds all around her, and that would cut her visibility. If she didn't make it to a ship, there was very little chance that a watchmare in the rigging would spot her coming through the clouds. If she couldn’t glide to a ship, she was finished.
I could go through when I still have some strength left, and if I don't see a ship, fly back above the clouds.
But then what? What if I don't? Should I try a second time?
It was smarter to do nothing. Up here, she was safe as long as the clouds held together, and while her current perch wouldn't last much longer, the rest of the clouds should persist for a good long time. Searchers would know to look on top of the clouds . . . unfortunately, her white coat would hardly stand out from the cloudmass.
That would put her further out to sea, true. Once the clouds started to break up, though, she could look through them until she spotted an island or a ship or something else.
There were lots of ships on the ocean. It wouldn't be that hard to find one. And that was a lot safer than flying blindly and hoping to find somewhere to land, especially with an injured wing that had already betrayed her once.
Cloud flexed her wings, testing their strength. It was best to rest them, but she had to abandon her tuft, so she kicked off the edge and glided down to the storm proper, looking for a nice thick landing spot, one that would hold together for long enough to rest and recover.
When she'd landed, she knocked herself a small depression, firming up the cloud a little bit. A bit of lightning sparked off her hooves but she ignored it while settling into her new, temporary cloudhome.
She tore a piece of the edge loose and sucked on it, getting the moisture out. As long as she had a big cloud to draw from, thirst wasn't going to be a problem, but hunger might.
There are plenty of fish in the ocean. When she was a filly, she'd learned to spot fish from the air, and knew how to dive in and catch them. There were also big mats of seaweed that floated near the surface sometimes, and while those didn't taste all that good raw, they were better than nothing.
She yawned and settled into her makeshift nest. Napping now is smart. If the storm cleared during the night, she might be able to see distant lights, either from a city or a lighthouse or a ship, and that would be a good target to fly towards.
• • •
She woke at the last light of the day. Already, the sun was below her view, illuminating the clouds to the west in brilliant oranges and reds. To the east, the sky was dark, and towards the horizon she could make out stars already.
What she couldn't see was any artificial light. She kept a good watch along the distant horizon—it was hard to tell where the clouds ended, and so she didn't know what she ought to be able to see, if anything at all. If the clouds were thin, there was a chance she'd be able to pick up the sweeping beam of a lighthouse through the cloud. It would be a faint light, to be sure, but it would be regular and unnatural.
Even after the entire sky had darkened, she saw nothing. Occasional flashes of lightning below her kept giving her false hope, even though she knew in her heart that the light was too bluish and too irregular to be a ponymade lighthouse.
From what she'd seen before the sun set, there was little chance of seeing anything upon the ocean to her west, so after she'd finally admitted to herself that there was no land there, she turned around and looked to the east, hoping against hope to see the bobbing masthead light of a square-rigger, but there were none to be seen.
She huddled down in her nest, trying to keep in her body heat. Now that the sun was gone, the top of the cloud was getting colder and colder.
Building a windbreak will help. That would remove any chances she had of seeing land to the west, though, something she was reluctant to do, so instead she curled up against the west wall of her little cloud nest, her rump and tail into the wind.
She tried to remember her geography. If she went far enough north, there was a chance that she'd go across the peninsula of land that stretched out into the ocean. That was the demarcation line between the pony lands and the frozen north—above that there was nothing but ice and hungry polar bears and yetis and if the storm drifted her that far north, she'd almost certainly freeze to death before she found any proper land. She could land on an iceberg, but what good would that do? It would melt before it drifted far enough south for sailorponies to see it.
Every instinct told her to get out of her cloudnest and fly for safety. There was land to the west, she knew it. This morning—or was it yesterday morning, now?—she'd flown down to the tavern and had a nice bowl of stew for breakfast and then she'd gone on cloud patrol with Star and Monarch and Aurora and Sky Flower and. . . .
. . . and they'll be looking for me. They won't know where I went. They must think
They must think that I've drowned.
It was night now, and they wouldn't be looking for her any more. If they hadn't found her while Celestia's sun was still in the sky, they wouldn't waste time at night. They'd think that the storm had gotten her.
Maybe for the next couple of days, they'd be keeping an eye on the shore. Right up near the tide line, because that was where a body might drift and stay, tumbling in the breakers like she’d been tumbling in the stormcloud.
She swallowed down a lump in her throat. If they hadn't found her by dark, everypony would assume she was dead. They'd have stopped looking for her.
Nopony was looking for her anymore.
Nopony knew that she was out here.
She was all alone.
And unless she kept her wits about her, they'd be right. She would be dead.
If I don't keep my wits about me, I am gonna be dead. Not as quick as they must be thinking, but it won't matter in the end, will it?
They'd sent her grandmother off on a cloud and was this any different? A little: there had been no mourners to see her leave and nopony sharing memories of her life.
Back at the tavern, though, they were probably already toasting to her memory. Star will be inconsolable. We've been partners since our apprenticeship.
Aurora would be feeling guilty, too, but Cloud didn't feel so bad about that. If she hadn't been point mare, she wouldn't be up on this cloud right now.
• • •
Cloud didn't remember falling asleep, but she must have, because suddenly it was morning.
For a moment, she thought she was back home, and then she bumped her muzzle on the edge of her cloud-nest and reality came crashing back to her.
She was afraid to look, but she had to know. She climbed up to the edge of her nest and surveyed her surroundings.
The storm was breaking up, which was the good news. Here and there she could see through the clouds around her.
The bad news was that she only saw open ocean through the holes in the clouds. No land, no shorebirds, and no ships. Nothing but a vast, empty sea.
She was higher up than she'd thought, which explained why it was so cold, and maybe why she still felt so exhausted. There wasn't as much air this high up—it was harder to breathe, harder to fly, and of course colder. Everypony knew that.
On the plus side, her altitude let her see further.
Unfortunately, there was nothing worth seeing.
I wish I'd paid more attention in school. There were trade winds, she knew that. It was what helped the ships get across the ocean. Some of them tended to blow east and some of them tended to blow west, and if she knew where they were, she could cloud-hop her way towards one, build a makeshift cloudhouse or even just sit atop a cloud, and eventually she'd blow back to land.
Were the westerlies to the north, or the south? She couldn't remember. Ships generally sailed down from Baltimare, but those were local trade ships, not oceangoing ships, and the winds near the shore weren't the same as the winds further out to sea.
The closest land was probably to the north. On that, she was reasonably confident. But too far north was no good; that was just ice.
South was safer. She thought she remembered that the big oceangoing ships arrived in the south and then made their way up the coast.
That doesn't make sense. Manehattan was a big trading port, and it wouldn't be so far north if the wind didn't go directly there, would it?
She shook her head. It was no good thinking about things she didn't know. If she was going to survive this, she'd have to focus on things she did know.
Food was a priority. Already, her belly was growling at her, demanding food. To get that, she was going to have to be lower, low enough that she could get a good view of the ocean to find fish or seaweed. Winds would take care of themselves, and the cloud would go where it went. The ocean didn't go on forever; sooner or later she'd fetch up on land of some sort.
She had to have food. And a bit of a shelter would be nice. She could use the cloud she had and make a crude cloudhut out of it. That would cost her some sail area on her cloud, because it was already getting pretty wispy, although it was likely a bit thicker if she went down further.
Today I'm going to find something to eat and I'm going to build myself a proper shelter. It would be rough—she wasn't much of a builder—but it would be something.
Gotta get lower. Cloud Climber studied the dregs of the storm, predicting how it would come apart. The best way to save energy—which was going to be a priority—was to find a good chunk of rained-out stormcloud that was about the right altitude and work on that. Once she had started to set it up, she could keep a watch on the ocean below for a school of fish that was swimming near the surface.
Lost at Sea Chapter 4: The Lonely Sea Admiral Biscuit
Fishing in the ocean was hard. In rivers and ponds, and even close to shore, the fish didn't have anywhere to go. Most of the best-tasting fish were close enough to the surface that they could be easily spotted by a gliding pegasus, and they generally weren't smart enough to see their doom coming from above.
Plus, it was easy enough to find birds that were fishing, and so even a pegasus who had little skill at finding fish on her own could just watch herons or cormorants and know where the fish were.
Out in the open ocean, there were no such clues. Cloud was aware that there were birds like albatrosses that flew far out into the ocean and ate the fish that they found there, but there weren't any of them around to watch, so she had to figure it out for herself.
It was something that seemed simple—she was over the ocean, and the ocean was full of fish—but it wasn't easy at all. Waves and shadows from clouds confused her, and if she did spot fish, she had no idea how big or how deep they were.
A fish that had seemed manageable from the clouds turned out to be some kind of enormous sunfish that could probably eat her if it had a mind to. Granted, catching one would solve all her food needs for a long time, but she was a smart enough mare to know not to pick on a fish that was bigger than her.
Other flashes in the water were false alarms. Reflections off of waves, strange things floating in the ocean that she had no name for, sharks and whales, strange glowing lights that turned out to be nothing when she got close to the water, or even fish that probably would have been catchable if they hadn't been swimming so deep. Cormorants and other seabirds could dive far below the surface to pick up a tasty fish; she wasn't much of a diver and couldn't manage more than a few ponylengths in, and by then the fish were long gone.
She did manage to find some seaweed that the storm had torn from the bottom, and while it wasn't very good at all, it was better than nothing.
Cloud knew to be careful eating it; it was saturated with saltwater and too much would make her sick. As a filly, she'd been swimming outside the harbor and seen a big thick mat of seagrass that looked really tasty—she'd been too young to know what drinking a lot of saltwater would do to her, and that life lesson had not been forgotten. She draped strands across her back and flew them up to her cloud, and let it dry off some in the sun before eating it. It didn't taste any better dried, but it didn't make her vomit, either.
• • •
She was on her cloud, gnawing at some more of the unappealing seaweed when she spotted the flying fish.
At first, she mistook them for a low-flying flock of silvery birds, and she almost ignored them completely, but she was already desperate for any diversion from her predicament, and as she watched them glide above the surface and then dive down again, she thought that maybe they were a heretofore unknown kind of seabird that had found something to eat.
As she descended, it quickly became obvious that they were in fact fish, and even better they were fish that would come to her.
There seemed to be an almost limitless number of them; as she got closer to the water, they were coming up in every direction, for reasons completely unknown to her.
Cloud wasn't about to let this unexpected gift go, and managed to nab a couple of them when they popped above the waves. They were quick and didn't stay up for very long, which made them really tricky to catch; they also didn't seem to view her as a threat, because they kept popping up even after she'd eaten a few of them.
On the few occasions she'd caught her own fish before, she'd never really paid much attention to what they did after she caught what she wanted, but this time she stayed on the edge of her cloud, studying how they behaved, in the hopes that that knowledge would bear fruit later. Maybe they only went flying certain times of the day, or when the waves were the right size, or when there were clouds above them.
She worked some bones out of her teeth with her tongue, spitting them off the edge of her cloud as she observed the ocean below her.
• • •
On her third and fourth day at sea, there were no fish to be found. She had to work on her cloud some—it was starting to break up, and before it totally dissipated she wanted to get some of the material from the edges to make herself a sunshade for the day and a windbreak for the night.
It was by no means a proper cloudhouse, but it would serve well enough, and it kept her hooves busy.
She kept a watchful eye on the ocean below, still hoping to see a sailing ship or—even better—land, but there was nothing.
Lots of sailorponies knew how to navigate using the stars. She was vaguely aware of the process; you needed to use a cross staff, astrolabe or octant to sight on known stars. In a pinch, just estimating a rough position by eyeball would work.
While Cloud had a nebulous knowledge of where stars appeared in the skies, it wasn't nearly enough to estimate her position, or even how her position was changing. She could have been drifting in any direction, at nearly any speed. For all she knew, the cloud blew one way during the day and then back again at night. There were no fixed landmarks below her, just the ever-shifting ocean.
• • •
By the end of the first week, days began to blur together. The sun came up and she climbed to the edge of her makeshift cloudhome—now alone over the vast ocean—and sat on the little outcropping she'd made her third day adrift. She'd spend the day looking below her for food, for land, for ships, for birds, for anything that was different.
She'd begun to learn to estimate sizes of fish from above, so when a school of tuna swam by below her, she ignored them. They were far too big for her to catch.
During the afternoon, she'd fly down and work some of the moisture rising off the ocean into small bits of cloud, to make up for what was still evaporating off her home and what she drank.
It was frighteningly lonely. She'd never been without contact with other ponies for so long. Even though she lived in her own cloudhouse, it didn't take much time to fly to somepony else's whenever she wanted to socialize. Besides work and all the gossip that went on there, she usually had dinners in the tavern after she was done with her day's weather duty.
A pony wasn't meant to be alone like this, with nopony else to talk to or hug or nuzzle.
• • •
Her second week adrift, she came close to being a shark's dinner. She'd found a school of herring that was swimming close to the surface, close enough that she could dive down and catch them, holding her mouth open until she felt something cold and slippery wiggling around inside.
At first, she'd had to surface to spit all the seawater out, but with practice she'd learned how to force it through her teeth, keeping the fish trapped inside.
Herrings were fast, and they were aware of a pony in their midst, so when she'd cornered some of them who weren't as smart as all the rest, she tried to stay under and swallow one right after another, and she'd stayed down almost too long.
It had been a natural assumption that all the fish were fleeing her, when instead they were scared of a much bigger threat than a pegasus. And for a brief moment, she'd been in the very center of an open spot in the school, a spot which had opened solely because of the shark.
Cloud didn't know very much about sharks except that struggling in the water or eating before going swimming attracted them, and here in the deep ocean there was nopony else to warn her that it was coming. She couldn't hear it because the water muffled her hearing, and she couldn't smell it, and when she thought back on how close it had been she was sure that if she hadn't surfaced to get a breath of air, the rows of sharp teeth that had just brushed against her tail would have clamped down on a hind leg for sure.
It came up out of the water just behind her, and that was when she finally noticed it. It had had enough momentum to get her if she'd kept flying forward, but the shock of it scared her up, and she tumbled a bit as it got a lock of tail hair and then she was far above where a shark could jump, watching the water warily.
After that, she always watched for open spots in schools and avoided them, instead trying to get around to the front and catch the leaders before they figured out what was happening.
• • •
She napped in the afternoon, if she'd caught fish and if her cloud was holding together. And during the night, she only dozed, frequently waking up in order to scan the horizon for any kind of ponymade light, no matter how insignificant.
When the moon had gone through a full cycle, that was a time to both celebrate and mourn. Her life on shore seemed more and more distant to her, and sometimes struggled to remember how she'd filled her days back then.
Memories of being ashore and having her hooves on dirt felt more and more distant. It was like trying to remember being a filly—it was long ago, and didn't feel very real to her anymore. Her life was raw fish when she could catch them, constantly patching up her windblown cloudshack, and scanning the horizon. It was sucking on cloud tufts to get the moisture out and guessing where she might be and wondering if a string of whitecaps was a sign of shallow water or just the ocean taunting her.
• • •
She'd been adrift for over two moons when she saw icebergs for the first time. It was hard to resolve objects over the ocean, especially if they were near the horizon. They could be distant clouds or distant land or just an optical illusion. Waves and refraction fooled her constantly.
The shape resolved into something that had edges too sharp to be a cloud, and her hopes began to rise. Sometimes mountains went all the way to the sea.
She wanted to fly off her cloud and right to it, but stopped herself before she could. It could be a really tall mountain, and if the conditions were just right, it might be more than a day's flying distance away, and then what would she do?
It hadn't been there the day before, and now it was, so she was obviously drifting towards it. She could afford to be patient: she'd survived this long, and another day wasn't going to kill her.
Cloud kept looking at it as the day went by, trying to estimate if it had gotten any closer. She scraped a bit of cloud off her roof and made a sort of height-stick—if she sat in the right place, she could judge if it was getting bigger, and therefore closer.
At first, she couldn't really tell. Her head might not be in the same place that it was before, and any movement could be caused by her cloud bumping up and down on the gentle thermals that rose off the ocean.
By midday, she was sure. She was closer to it.
She spent the rest of the day watching as it grew. Even though she should have, she didn't watch for schools of fish below her; instead, she imagined trotting around on the dirt. Eating fresh grass, right from the ground. Rolling on it.
There were islands that stood all by themselves in the oceans. She knew that from reading books about sailors, and from talking to other ponies.
Cloud also knew that some of them were small, and isolated, and not a good place to be shipwrecked. But even if it was just a little island, it would be better than a cloud.
Maybe there would be pools of water on it, and she could take a bath. Her coat was permanently encrusted with salt and clumped up in some places that she couldn't easily groom.
As the sun set, it stood out in sharp relief, and instead of napping, she stayed awake, watching it from her cloud, willing it to get closer. She studied it for any signs of artificial light, of life.
There was enough moonlight for her to see it glowing like a ghost and she started to wonder if phantom islands existed.
Everypony knew that there were ghost ships that sailed the ocean forever trying to get back to their home port. So why not an island? She'd heard that some islands were actually volcanoes and that sometimes they blew themselves to smithereens and maybe the ghost of the island drifted around trying to find the spot where it had been.
If she'd been on land and somepony had told her that, she probably would have thought they were being silly, but out here all by herself it was conceivable.
Cloud didn't realize it was an iceberg until it drifted right under her cloud. She'd thought that the moonlight or the waves were playing tricks with her, and fooling her into thinking it was closer than it really was.
She couldn't deny it when it suddenly went from being in front of her to being under her. It was only then that she noticed the waves breaking along the edge.
Even though it wasn't the island she'd hoped for, she flew down to it anyways, landing on a flat spot near the top. She licked the ice until it gave her a crushing headache, and when she'd recovered, she chipped a big chunk off and carried it up to her house, knocking a little bowl into the edge of the cloud for it to sit.
Depending on how fast it melted, she'd have a small bowl of fresh water for a couple of days.
• • •
The next morning, there was a whole field of icebergs under her. She flew down to one that had a small pool of meltwater on it and used it to rinse the salt out of her coat.
The day after that, they were all gone.
Whether they'd moved on or she had, she wasn't sure.
The night after the icebergs, the ocean was glowing again. That had been a surprise the first time she'd seen it, and she'd flown down to investigate, but found nothing of interest.
This time was different, though. There was movement that she hadn't seen before, and she finally went down to get a closer look.
She skimmed across the top of the water, constantly looking up to check where her cloud was—if she lost it, she would die. It was that simple.
They were fish that glowed. She could see them clearly, even after she rubbed her eyes to make sure that she wasn't imagining it. And they were close to the surface; she could see them sometimes rise up into a wave, and that meant that they were catchable.
Cloud was still wary of sharks, so instead of diving, she flew through the waves that had the glowing fish inside them, catching only the ones that were closest to the crest.
Those fish tasted different than all the others she'd eaten, and it was a welcome change.
As tempting as it was, she didn't gorge herself on them; after she'd eaten a dozen, she flew back to her house before it could drift too far away, and curled up to sleep.
Cloud had completely lost track of days. Moons, she still knew. That was a smaller number to count.
The day after her third moon at sea, she saw a big storm on the horizon, and by midday it was obvious it was headed in her direction.
She pushed her cloud up as high as she could, where it would hopefully be above the worst of it, but it turned out that wasn't high enough. She abandoned her home as the storm rolled over it, eagerly devouring her pitiful little cloud.
Even though it did no good, she swore at the storm as it wrecked her home, swallowing up the cloud and dropping the seaweed she’d been keeping back to the ocean. That was the saddest reminder of her former home—strands of dried seaweed fluttering back down to the waves like autumn leaves.
For two days, she rode on top of the storm, doing her best to find the safest perches as the clouds pitched and twisted below her. She did not dare to attempt to fly under it and fish. She spent the entire third day of the storm gathering new cloud bits to make another home, since she could see this storm was breaking apart.
It wasn't as good as her last home had been—three moons of boredom had let her make quite a few improvements—but this time she'd been smart and gathered more clouds together, which might cut down on the number of emergency repairs she would have to make.
By the dawn of the fourth day, the last dregs of the storm were nowhere to be seen, leaving the ocean itself a beautiful blue, and as flat as a millpond.
There wasn't time to admire it, though; her belly was howling with hunger. She'd burned a lot of energy in the storm and more building her home and she didn't have much left to spare. If she lost much more weight, she'd just float off the next time a wind blew.
When she first saw bottom, she was sure that it was an optical illusion. While she didn't know exactly how deep the ocean was, she knew that it was deep enough to cover an entire ship, masts and all, and she also knew that you usually couldn't see more than a few dozen ponylengths through the water. There were too many minerals and things in the water.
Plus, there wasn't any land around. If she'd been drifting towards an island, she might have believed that she was really seeing the bottom . . . but then, if she'd been drifting towards an island, she would have already abandoned her cloud and been flying there, not looking down at the ocean hoping to see a school of fish swimming by or a small raft of seaweed.
Then she started seeing pony-like shapes in the water.
She was sure that those were hallucinations. She'd already learned that hunger and sleep deprivation could bring them on, and the easiest way to reveal them for the fraud they were was to close her eyes for a few seconds and then re-open them. They would come back, generally, but they would be different than they were before.
The underwater ponies didn't change. They, and the bottom, stayed exactly the same as it had been.
She still didn't believe it, not until she saw a very pony head come above the water and look around curiously. Not up—she remained unseen. A moment later, several other heads joined the first, and she could faintly hear conversation. It was a language she did not know, but that didn't matter. Lots of sailorponies talked in different languages and she couldn't understand them but there was still a rhythm and a lilt to talking even if she didn’t know what was being said.
If there were ponies in the water, than there was food, too, and so she kicked off her cloud and glided down in a broad arc, keeping an eye on the strange ponies.
Unfortunately, they saw her, and before she could get too close, she heard shouts of alarm and they vanished below the waves.
I must look like a predator to them, she thought. Especially since I came out of nowhere. Sailors said that the merponies were shy, but they also said that they'd help you where you were in distress, and she qualified for that.
Even though it pained her to lose all her momentum, she splashed down in the water and gracelessly came to a stop. Then she waited and hoped.
For the longest time, they didn't return, and Cloud was left bobbing in the middle of the ocean, terrifyingly alone. Somehow, pony-paddling in the water felt more isolated than when she was up in her cloudraft—maybe it was because she couldn't see as far, or because the horizon line was now in the wrong place.
She stuck her head under the water and tried to look around, although paradoxically, she couldn't see as far as she could when she was up above the water's surface.
She thought that there were pony-shapes off in the distance, but she couldn't be sure. The ocean water was tricking her.
Up above, her cloud stayed in place. What wind there had been had died off completely.
All of a sudden, they were around her. Where one moment before, there had been nothing but open ocean, now there was a ring of curious faces.
Cloud paddled in place until they got their courage up and realized that she was no threat. Then they began to close in on her, some of them remaining on the surface, while others dove back under the water.
She hoped she wasn't wrong about their intentions. If she was, she didn't have a chance.
The ponies that surrounded her stopped just out of hoof's reach, and studied her before the silvery-green one finally spoke. “Wat dochsto hjir? Hat jo skip sink yn 'e stoarm?”
“Binne jo yn need?” a second one asked.
Her ears drooped. A few words sounded like they were almost Equestrian, but she couldn't understand them. “Hungry,” she said. “Food.” She lifted a hoof up to her mouth, hoping that they wouldn't misunderstand.
“Hun-gry,” the silvery-green one mimicked, then turned to a grey-blue mare. “Ik tink dat it sky hynder sei dat se honger is.”
“Ik sil sejinge en fisk krije.” The grey-blue mare disappeared below the surface, followed by several of her friends.
Cloud watched them go with a bit of apprehension. Hopefully they could see that she needed help, and they weren't off to find reinforcements—not that she would be much trouble. If they tried to mob her, there was very little chance that she could get herself clear of the water before they were on top of her.
They seemed trustworthy, and when she thought about it more cynically, she didn't have all that many other options anyways.
“Binne der oaren?” Once the silver-green mare had Cloud's attention, she repeated her question, and then splashed around in the water a little before dropping her head slightly under the surface. The ponies near her imitated her motions, and then those that were a bit further away lifted them up and paddled them away.
Cloud struggled to make sense of the pantomime, before realizing that she was asking if there were other ponies who needed help.
She shook her head. “Only me. I got blown out to sea in a storm.” She pointed up to her cloud.
“Stoarm.” The silver-green mare made thunder noises and lifted her forehooves up, letting water drip off them into the ocean.
Cloud nodded. “Big storm.”
“Gjin skip?” She made bobbing motions with her hooves.
She pointed up to her cloud again.
“Skippen hawwe skypels mei her,“ one of the other seaponies remarked.
The silver-green mare nodded. “Miskien is se út har skip blaas.”
“Do you know where land is?”
“Wy sjogge gjin skip.”
“It kin wêze fan Opstân.”
Their brief discussion was interrupted by the return of their companions. They proudly held a large fish—much larger than Cloud had ever attempted to catch—along with several thick bundles of seaweed.
The fish was tempting. It was quick energy, and that was something her body needed, badly. But a pony wasn't meant to live on fish alone, and there were minerals and vitamins that the fish couldn't provide, which made the seaweed look even more appetizing.
She awkwardly paddled over to the closest merpony, and reached for the food, then hesitated. I hope they're offering this to me.
A pair of hooves thrust it forward, the signal unmistakable. Cloud leaned in and eagerly ate a mouthful, then another.
It was the most delicious thing she'd ever tasted, and before she even realized what she'd done, the entire pile was gone.
“Se wie honger!”
The merponies around her all chuckled, but she didn't care.
• • •
She stayed with them for a week. She brought down her cloud, much to their amazement, and during the day she helped them hunt fish. Cloud could spot them when they were quite a ways away, and direct the merponies to where the fish were.
In return, she got all the seaweed she could eat, and she also got to share a fish with them. They'd called it giele fin tún, and she didn't know what that was but it was big and delicious.
One morning when she woke up, they were gone. Or, more properly, she was. The winds had picked back up, and she'd drifted away from them.
She knew in her heart that she'd never find them again, but that didn't stop her from spending most of the day circling around, hoping against hope that she might be reunited, but it was not to be.
Somehow, losing them was even sadder than when she'd first drifted out to sea, and she couldn't understand why that was so.
Lost at Sea Chapter 6: Water, Water, Everywhere Admiral Biscuit
One moonless night, Cloud laid on her back and looked up at all the stars. It was terrifying—it was as if she was floating in a void with nothing but tiny sharp pinpricks of light above her, and yet she was afraid turn her head away. She felt like she was the only pony there was, and everything else was her imagination. Maybe this was the only thing that was real. There might not even be a cloud underneath her back.
She thought that this could be death. She might have died in the storm after all, and this was the darkness that came after, and all she had to do was let go and drift off to freedom.
Sometimes the cloud under her felt less tangible, like it was slipping away. Maybe it was a ghost cloud, and she was just a ghost pegasus floating along on it.
Cloud closed her eyes, but the image of the uncaring stars was burned into her retinas, and she couldn’t unsee it.
She tugged some of the cloud with her wingtips, pulling it over her, digging herself into the cloud, becoming part of the cloud.
• • •
The nights were getting colder, and all she could do was burrow down into her cloud when the sun went down, inside a little bowl that would hold some of her heat in as long as the wind didn’t suck it right back out.
She had stopped counting moons. There was nothing but the clouds and the ocean. Land was a distant memory, something which might have been imagined. Every day was the same day, repeated and repeated and repeated and repeated.
Down below her, the ocean was almost black in the false light of the moon, and she sometimes saw large shadow-shapes moving just below the surface. Every now and then, a fountain of white would shoot up from the water from one of these shadows, and she was sure that it was something trying to catch her. Some leviathan of the deep that wanted to knock her cloud out of the sky and gobble her up.
Her cloud was high enough to be clear of them, she hoped, and if it wasn’t, she was too weak to fight them off, so she closed her eyes and tried to think of her friends back in Chonamare. Tried to imagine what they were doing.
Tried to remember what bread tasted like.
• • •
Cloud’s ribs jutted out from her barrel and her teeth felt loose in their sockets. She could wiggle them with her tongue and that didn’t seem right to her. Her mane and tail had lightened in the constant sunlight or because she couldn’t remove the salt that encrusted them, or maybe it was both.
Some of her feathers had fallen out, and she didn’t know if that was because she was moulting or if it was from her not eating enough vegetables and grass.
She climbed to the edge of her cloud and looked down at the emerald-green sea below her, her eyes searching for a school of fish or a few pitiful clumps of seaweed.
It would be easier to just stop looking. Easier to just sit on her cloud and wait for the end.
A group of silvery flashes that weren’t the sun moved below her, and she dove, speeding towards the water, effortlessly calculating how much she needed to lead the herring. She scanned the school, watching for open spots that might be caused by a shark or some other fish that was eating the herring and might want to eat her.
She held her forehooves out in front of her to break the surface of the water, and she folded her wings just before she hit. Cloud felt a fish in her mouth and squirted the saltwater through her teeth, then swallowed it whole as she was coming back up out of the water in preparation for another dive.
She felt better with a full belly, and climbed back into the sky, her eye on a distant albatross. Maybe it knows where land is.
Cloud climbed up until she was flying parallel with it.
She flew up alongside and he regarded her with a beady black eye and squawked at her, then turned his head forward and continued flying.
For most of the day, she flew alongside him, always keeping watch below for clouds so she’d have someplace to land. Her old cloud was forgotten—there was nothing there that she wanted, and making a new cloudhome would give her something different to do.
When the sun was only a hoofspan above the ocean, she broke formation with her flying companion and glided down to a thick cumulous cloud. It was big enough to build a cloud-mansion if she’d wanted to, but she didn’t. She found an outcropping near the west side of it and bashed a small depression in the cloud, then settled down for another chilly night adrift.
• • •
There was nothing but ocean below and sky above and some days she hardly knew the difference. The ocean was a reflection of the sky, or maybe the sky was a reflection of the ocean. It didn't matter, really.
One day, she tore off a little lump of cloud and made it into a kind of pony shape, and she talked to it, giving it a moment-by-moment description of her life. It didn't talk back, but that was okay. It felt better to be talking to something. Even if it didn’t talk back.
The next day, she thought it might be hungry, so she put a small herring on it and pushed it away.
She had never imagined that she would see land again. It was only a distant memory, and maybe not a real one.
Her world had shrunk down to food and shelter and not much else, so she didn't see the land right away. Even as she drifted inexorably towards it, she didn't recognize it at first: It might have been a distant mass of clouds, after all.
As she got closer, though, it began to resolve into something different. The lines got sharper and perhaps a little bit more regular, and it became obvious that the waves she saw below her were relentlessly marching towards the shore. What was purple-grey became tan and green.
She got to her hooves and climbed to the very edge of her cloud, like a sailorpony standing on the bow. Off in the distance, she could see shorebirds patrolling the beach and occasionally diving down into the breaking sea.
It wasn't until she clearly saw the trellises and regular rows of a vineyard that she finally concluded that this was indeed actual, inhabited land.
Even so, it took her an hour to finally become willing to abandon her cloud for the last time, before she was absolutely certain that this wasn't some strange mirage or wishful thinking or a hallucination.
Her cloud was nearly over the land, and maybe if the weather patrol had been paying more attention, they would have spotted it and sent somepony to investigate.
Cloud glided down over the beach, and she held her hooves aloft for the longest time before her speed was finally spent and she touched down on a sandy beach.
Her landing was rather awkward, but was it any wonder? She stumbled when her hooves touched solid land for the first time in over five moons, and then she regained her balance and stood proudly at the border between beach and soil.
A few clumsy steps brought her to a cluster of beachgrass, and she stuck her head down and nibbled at the marram, the tender and delectable and salt-free marram grass.
She sniffed at the rich, loamy soil, and then rolled around on her back in pure pleasure, letting the land caress her.
I’m on land! Cloud was sure that being crowned Princess of Equestria wouldn’t feel as good as the feel of the soil shifting under her hooves, or the sweet pure smell of the earth.
It would only be a short flight to a farmhouse, but for now she was content to sniff around at the almost-forgotten plants, to have some smell in her nose that wasn’t salt or seaweed or fish, so she stayed where she was, sampling the land air that was teasing over her nostrils, trying to get a sense of the new land she’d found herself upon.
• • •
Her mind insisted that if she took her hooves off the ground, it might vanish, and she might find herself back on her cloud, so she walked on stumbling hooves, searching for anypony who could tell her where she was. She knew that there must be ponies nearby, because she was following a path through a vineyard.
Her leg muscles protested but she didn’t care. The occasional fall was more proof that the ground was real.
Even though it was rude, she ate a few grapes right off their vines and it was as if she’d never eaten fruit before. If her stomach hadn’t protested, she might have denuded the entire field.
The farmhouse was a trim building with stuccoed walls and a neat thatched roof. The smoke from the chimney was another smell she’d almost forgotten, but it drew her in.
It took a moment, but her knocks were finally answered by a deep blue colt.
His eyes widened, and he turned his head back into the house. “Il y a un poney fou à la porte!” he said, in a language she recognized. She even knew a little bit of Prench.
“J'ai Cloud Climber.”
“C’est un fou?” came another voice from within the house.
“On dirait qu'elle vit dans un fossé, elle a de l'herbe et de la boue dans son pelage et du sel dans sa crinière.”
She heard new, firmer hoofsteps on the hardwood floor, and presently a heavyset russet mare appeared at the door and gave her a critical look. “Je suis Auvergne. J'ai vu du bois flotté plus joli échoué sur la plage. D'où viens-vous?”
Cloud Climber flicked her ears. “A storm, a big storm. Um, vent. Poussé la mer.”
The mare nodded. “Entrez.” Then she turned to the colt. “Ariégeois, elle est mal en point. Va lui préparer un bain.”
Cloud Climber followed her into the house. She could smell stew, and her mouth watered at the thought of cooked food. Instead of being directed to the kitchen, however, she was led into a small sitting-room at the front of the house.
“Assis-toi là. Prends un peu de cognac. Ça va t'aider à te remonter.”
“Bonjour,” Cloud replied.
The couch was firm in a way that clouds weren’t, and as she stretched out, the pressure on her ribs felt strange.
She turned her head and studied her weatherblown tail and stained coat while feeling ashamed at how bad she looked. Maybe I should sneak out through a window and clean myself up some and then try again. But it was too late; her hostess had returned with a ceramic jug held in her mouth.
“Buvez-en. Juste un petit peu.” She gripped it in the crook of a hoof and pulled the cork out with her teeth, then presented the bottle for Cloud to sip.
The warm fire of the liquor had the desired effect, and it was followed by a thick slab of bread covered in butter and blueberry preserves.
Once the mare was satisfied that Cloud wouldn’t collapse from starvation, she led to the bathroom and helped her into the bathtub. The warm water and lavender-scented bath oil was too much for Cloud to take, and she began crying when the mare gently rinsed the salt out of her coat.
The bathwater had to be changed several times as she was washed and groomed by the mare and her son. They did the best that they could with her tangled mane and tail, but some knots were too thick to be removed with a brush, so they carefully cut them out
They fed her a dinner of thick, hearty barley stew and a mille-feuille that practically melted in her mouth before leading her back outside to a sturdy wooden hoof-stand, and the mare began trimming and filing Cloud’s overgrown hooves.
Their house had a spare bedroom which felt small and confining after the openness of the sea and sky, and if she hadn’t been so weak and tired she would have tried to push past her host so she could sleep outside. If there weren’t any clouds, the roof of the house would do.
The feel of diaphanous sheets and a heavy woolen blanket were almost too much for her to bear
There were times that the ground was frightening. Lots of ponies wanted to talk to her, and they didn’t speak Equestrian quite right—or maybe it was her. She couldn’t be certain; all that she knew was that sometimes their words grated upon her ears, and she longed for the solitude and simplicity of her cloud and the ocean and nothing else.
Most of the time, she stayed at the small vineyard with Auvergne and Ariégeois. She learned to tend to the grapes, and flew bird patrol, feeling a bit guilty every time she chased a small flock of starlings off. After all, her first proper land food had been stolen grapes.
Some afternoons she watched over the sea, sitting atop a cloud that she put together, much to the confusion of her host.
Unbeknownst to her, she had circled the ocean for months, caught between trade winds. The feral winds that had spawned her storm had conspired to put her into a continuous loop of the ocean. Had she known, perhaps she could have flown northward for a day and made a new cloud, or southward . . . out of the reach of the winds. But she hadn't known, and so she'd circled over the ocean several times, just out of eyeshot of merchant ships.
The capricious winds had finally shown her a bit of mercy, guiding her out of the endless cycle and into a more easterly breeze, where she'd traveled for half a moon as it made its way slowly but inevitably towards a distant shore.
It took weeks before Cloud finally accepted the land as truly real.
She sat in her room, with the sea breeze gently blowing through an open window, ruffling the lacy white curtains. A quill sat beside a fresh sheet of paper, as she considered what she might write in a letter home. Would anypony believe her story? She could hardly believe it herself.
If it hadn’t been for Star Catcher, she might have left the letter unwritten, but she couldn’t leave her wingmare unsure of her fate.
Cloud Climber finally picked up the quill in her mouth and began writing.
